Cory Doctorow has a collection of articles out, called 'Content', which can also be freely downloaded under a Creative Commons licence from his site craphound.com: the direct link is here.

From the site: "Content is my first nonfiction collection, collecting over a dozen essays, speeches, and white-papers on subjects ranging from copyright to science fiction writing to DRM, Wikipedia to Facebook and Metadata. It sports an introduction by one of my all-time heroes: John Perry Barlow. It was published in September, 2008 by Tachyon Books."

There's only a couple of formats available, but apparently if you convert the book to a particular format or for a particular device, he'll host it on his site.

I downloaded the Mobipocket version, which is named [.mobi], not [.prc]. It opened okay in my desktop Mobi Reader, but not on my PDA. Is this actually a different file format, or can I rename to .prc and expect that it might work?

Of course, I could just try it and see, couldn't I? Yes, it appears to work.

I downloaded the Mobipocket version, which is named [.mobi], not [.prc]. It opened okay in my desktop Mobi Reader, but not on my PDA. Is this actually a different file format, or can I rename to .prc and expect that it might work?

Of course, I could just try it and see, couldn't I? Yes, it appears to work.

Thanks, Jeff, for answering my question.

*Not at all, Jeff. Happy to help.*

Yes you can rename it. If you download from the mobile website (http://feedbooks.mobi) you'll directly get a .prc instead of a .mobi

For eReader on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you can just type that URL directly into eReader's "other sites" URL box and it should pull it right down—no need to download to your PC and re-upload to your eReader account. Unless you want to.

I'll be reading through the book completely in the next few days and making any revisions that I feel are necessary, but that one should be more than readable right now.

Still far from the final version; there are a number of little tweaks I need to make as I read through it (mainly movie and book titles needing to be italicized). Hope to have the final version sent in by sometime tomorrow.

OK, my final version is done. Among other things, I corrected the title of a Heinlein story to be the one Doctorow actually meant, and I also snagged about a third of a paragraph of missing text from the original on-line posting of one essay and restored it. As well as fixing a number of grammatical errors, typos, missing words, missing italicization, and so on. Go, me.

You can find it at the URL above. I don't know when Cory will receive/put it up on his page.

One thing to note: for whatever reason, all the "official" versions of the book are still missing half a paragraph in the chapter of "Facebook's Faceplant." Half of the first paragraph is missing. And all the conversions that were done without going through and double-checking the book afterward (as I did for mine) are missing it, too (including the version currently up on Feedbooks—I just checked it). I ended up going back to the original on-line posting of the article (which was still there) to snag it for my version.

I also corrected a few typos in mine, fixed the title of a Heinlein story (Cory made reference to "The Man Who Sold the Moon" when he meant The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and niced up the formatting, including indentation and bold face for section headers where appropriate. (Oh, and proper opening and closing quotes, too.)

I did mention them to him. (In fact, he made me un-correct one of them—a "you and me" as opposed to "you and I"—as it was an "intentional colloquialism.") And I even sent him the PML markup file, intending that he could post it alongside my completed version for people who wished to "roll their own" with revisions—but he hasn't bothered to do so. I guess I could post it on my own site, if there's demand.

But to note, it's in PML, in all its \c\x\backslashy glory\x\c. Unless you have a way of stripping or transmuting that, you'd probably have better luck using the ereader2html crack to explode the compiled version into HTML (if that crack works on unencrypted books).

I did mention them to him. (In fact, he made me un-correct one of them—a "you and me" as opposed to "you and I"—as it was an "intentional colloquialism.")

Writer's privilege, I guess.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robotech_Master

And I even sent him the PML markup file, intending that he could post it alongside my completed version for people who wished to "roll their own" with revisions—but he hasn't bothered to do so. I guess I could post it on my own site, if there's demand.

Any chance you could save the fixed version in some other format? Say html? Ereader2html won't work on the non-DRM'd ereader file that was posted (and the mobi at Doctorow's site is still missing the 2nd half of the paragraph).

I've seen some mention that book designer might do the translation - but the page to download it is unreadable. I know you're supposed to find and download version 4 and install it, then all the updates - I just could not figure out where all the required files were.

Any chance you could save the fixed version in some other format? Say html? Ereader2html won't work on the non-DRM'd ereader file that was posted (and the mobi at Doctorow's site is still missing the 2nd half of the paragraph).

I've seen some mention that book designer might do the translation - but the page to download it is unreadable. I know you're supposed to find and download version 4 and install it, then all the updates - I just could not figure out where all the required files were.